


How You Got Here

by Heather



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-02
Updated: 2008-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-08 03:56:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/72448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My challenge was "A world where Peter's gone mad from absorbing too many powers, and has imposed [<i>sic</i>] a absolute dictatorship over the world in a misguided attempt to perfect it. West is leading the resistance, and Claire is torn between her brother and her lover." The story I ended up telling was the story of Peter's madness and how he ends up imposing a dictatorship and destroying the world. West and Claire are here, but it's not their story. It's Peter's.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How You Got Here

**Author's Note:**

  * For [milleniumrex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/milleniumrex/gifts).



> Super-special awesome I-owe-you-for-life thanks to [](http://s8219.livejournal.com/profile)[**s8219**](http://s8219.livejournal.com/) and [](http://lady1raven.livejournal.com/profile)[**lady1raven**](http://lady1raven.livejournal.com/) for their generous help and contributions. Also? This fic is not anywhere as long or inclusive as I wanted it to be, and it has the worst telling-instead-of-showing problem of anything I've ever written, but frankly, if I worked on it anymore, I was going to go drown myself in a lake. This story nearly KILLED me.

*

You're on a beach and you're drawing pictures in the sand. You don't remember how you got here. You might not be here yet. You might have been here before as someone else.

It's hard to tell, these days.

(_Sometimes, you're Isaac and you're curled on the floor, wracked with pain from heroin withdrawl, and the bomb's going to go off any day--_

_Sometimes, you're Hiro, and you're hanging pictures on strings, trying to know **when--**_

_Sometimes, you're Adam, and the train is being invented--the plane--or maybe the car--)_

You can't remember the last time you were Peter.

*

You're in a government-sponsored clinic with tiny electrodes glued all over your head.

_You're special,_ they tell you, and they want to know what "special" means. You're not like any other specimen they've collected.

Names for what you are (_what you have_) roll off their tongues as they measure you: copycat, chameleon, sponge...

(_Freak._)

You find yourself strangely hurt by it. You don't know why you are the way you are. You can't tell them, but they keep asking. It makes you tired.

You're special and they want to know why that is.

Because you could save the world.

*

(_You're Claire and Nathan's on the television._

_Your hand still itches with a sense of Pain That Was, with glass shards that are no longer in your skin and blood that has disappeared. You want your daddy, and find it bitterly amusing that Nathan--your father, but not your father--is right there._

_You stare in shock when you see Peter._

_The Petrelli brothers are together and alive._

_They're together, and alive, and they're thinking like you._

_Nathan tells everyone what he is. But this time--this time--there is no bullet. No blood. No death._

_Everyone learns.)_

Time. Rewrites.

*

You're in the facility where they tested you. You, and Nathan. Matt Parkman. Others you haven't met before.

(_Claire's not here, not yet. Neither you nor Nathan would give them her name. They can't prove you witheld it.)_

The clothes on your backs are not your own. Black t-shirts with matching fatigues--they tell you it's a matter of convenience, a matter of what they have onhand, but you're not an idiot. You wonder who they think they're fooling.

You each have a tag they assigned to you throughout testing--metal, with a serial number, a short list of your abilities

_(Matt and Nathan's have their abilities. Yours just says "other.")_

and information such as your blood types and your religions.

They can't strictly be called dog tags, because they happen to lack your real names.

A big deal is made about calling you all together, properly dressed and tagged for the occasion, about showing up on time and ready to listen to every word that they say. You start keeping a running tally in your head for how many times "crucial" and "special" are tossed around during the speech.

At the end of it, you're casually informed of what you already knew: you work for the U.S government now.

*

Time spools out and in. You can't hold it any more than you can hold one mind in your head.

Because you take pieces from others to make yourself. Because those pieces stopped just being powers and started being _everything._ Because you do it even in times before you knew you could, time shifting and rewriting itself to fit the vast ocean of power and potential that you've become.

You can change and fix anything, everything. You're a fixed point in a universe that wheels and tilts but doesn't bother to move you.

You're everywhere. You're everywhen. You're everyone.

_Special._

*

It's Christmas and Claire visits, with a boyfriend in tow. You don't like the kid. You wryly think that if _you_ believe someone needs a haircut, they've got serious issues.

Besides, what kind of name is "West," anyway? It's a direction on a map, not something you call a person.

It takes you a few minutes to realize your thoughts are half Nathan's. It disturbs you, but you move on.

Claire's gone brunette since the last time you saw her--a necessity in this clime where people like you are found and pressed into service every day--

_(A tickle of another future pulls at you. You taste fragments--weddings and strippers and scars--but turn away.)_

and she looks beautiful, radiant.

You tell her so in the kitchen while Nathan and West supervise Simon and Monty opening presents in the living room, and she smiles and whispers, "Can you keep a secret?"

You can, but she can't. Her thoughts scream it at you before she says anything.

She's going to marry him.

You don't like it. They're only eighteen, the pair of them, and Claire will almost certainly live to bury this boy

_(not to mention how many others--Adam buried ten)_

and that'll hurt her. There's new legislation now to identify your kind at birth; if she has his children, they'll almost certainly be found, when you and Mom and Nathan and Noah have all worked so hard to hide her.

You open your mouth to tell her all of this, except your mind becomes hers and the future becomes the present and you know _everything_ she's going to say.

You untangle the skeins of time--of rifts you could create, arguments you could have--and put yourself firmly where she is. You take your medicine like a good boy, with a pained smile and a sincere-sounding murmur of "That's great."

You do it for the hug she gives you, for the wedding invitation waiting for you eighteen months in the future, for the shy way West admits he has no friends and asks you to be his best man. You do it because that's who you are. Because it's the good, kind thing to do. Because you need something and her sad smile once saved your life when you crashed into a parked cab.

*

You're in a field somewhere--you can't remember where, you want to say Africa, but it's been so long--and you're the only one that isn't dying. It's your first operation where they've sent you to take care of the situation alone.

_(They almost never send you alone--you absorb too many, you feel too much, you think too little. Who could control you if there wasn't a buffer between you and the people you're supposed to be saving?)_

There's disease and war everywhere, and it's more than you can handle.

_(Freeze time, defuse a bomb. Super strength, destroy weapons. Use drop after drop of the blood Adam and Claire transformed in you to save the "right" people._

_You'll save whoever you damn well feel like.)_

You didn't get to this village in time. People moan and scream everywhere in pain. The stench of blood and burning flesh is heavy in the air.

You can turn back time, still go back and save them. "A do-over," Hiro would say. This doesn't count.

But it hurts something awful to watch what happens when you don't--when you're not there, when you didn't get it right the first time.

There's a woman digging a grave with her bare hands. Two small children and a baby are lying dead beside her. You close your eyes and you're in her mind, your heart ready to explode with the sense of her grief. _My babies, my babies, my babies..._

You force it out, and try to center yourself--_be here, be now, go back, fix it_\--but it's so hard to think of Hiro, Mr. Optimistic, and channel his power here.

You think of Charles Devaux instead and think that this wasn't the world you promised him you'd make.

*

They gave you a _pin._

It's the stupidest thing you've ever held in your hand, and it's supposed to make up for the pain of the ones you've saved

_(all in your mind, all screaming)_

and the worse pain of the ones you didn't.

_(Chose not to, didn't you? There's no other explanation. Not for you, not for Mr. Paradox, who can do it all. You can do anything.)_

It's technically a medal for heroic services, and presented to you with all the pomp and ceremony that the public believes a hero deserves, but in the end, it's just a pin.

You lie on your back in a locker room holding it over your head, and you wonder bitterly how many lives were worth a sliver of gold you can poke through your shirt.

*

_(You're Mom and one of her baby sons--Nathan, you think, judging by her apparent youth--is grabbing at a coin on a string Linderman's dangling for him. When he catches it, the chain slides through, leaving only the coin. He thrusts it into his mouth, and has a look of dissatisfaction comically out of place for a baby. His chubby hand reaches for the string._

_Linderman chuckles. "Angela, my dear, I must congratulate you for this one. Eight months old, and he already refuses to settle for what he's got."_

_A smile curves your face--her face--and there's a brief taste of champagne. "He is quite a handful."_

_Linderman simply smiles, then says to the baby, "You keep it up. You'll save the world someday." He slowly sets the baby back into the playpen, then looks to Mom. "And on that note...let me tell you what I've been discussing with our good friend, Mr. Monroe.")_

*

You think, for the very first time, that you're beginning to understand.

From the very beginning, you were chosen more often than anyone else. They chose you for a number of reasons. Because you didn't have a family--not in the sense of a wife and children, people who depend on you the way they depend on Nathan and Matt. Because you were young and healthy, and indestructible. Because you were irreplacable. Because you can do what no other human being can do.

Because what do you have, besides this?

The word "freak" has slowly been replaced in their minds with the word "god."

It's the kind of thing that can go to one's head.

You're pretty sure it's gone to yours.

You're pretty sure because you're realizing now that you don't need them.

They're in the way of everything they've ever wanted you to do, of the better world they keep saying they want you to make.

You looked at your pin and knew you were worth more than this.

You looked into their minds and hearts, and knew they weren't worth anything at all.

You're not angry when you blow up their base and burn the city to the ground.

You're just realizing what everyone who has ever been in your position has eventually come to understand.

The world could be better if there just weren't so many Goddamn people in it.

*

"Why did you do it?"

You almost laugh at her attempt to confront you. She doesn't understand. Claire's just a child. Just a kid who deserves her engagement parties, wedding vows and honeymoon romance.

You're going to make the world better. You _have_ to make the world better.

For her. For everyone.

In her mind _(you don't mean to pry, but strong thoughts can drown out spoken words)_ you hear his name, the name 'West' and her fears of what he'll do. You hear retaliation thoughts and they're against you.

Claire's building her own family and you're not necessarily a part of it. You're not needed, you're merely wanted.

That's not always enough.

_(It's nothing, compared to this. This...power. The way you've slowly Become.)_

The word 'family' doesn't mean 'forgiveness.' She wants to believe in you, and she'll give you as many opportunities as reasonably available, but you don't want that now. Maybe the Peter That Used To Be could settle for that, but you never will.

She walks away. You let her go.

She'll understand when it's over.

*

_(You're West when you try to stop. You've gotten too powerful, too strange, you're not sure you're even human anymore._

_He leads a small army against you, and it's laughable how he thinks that he can change anything. Niki beats you bloody while the Haitian blocks your powers because they think (you know that) you need to be stopped._

_You're Linderman when you know you're right, and don't care that people think you're insane._

_You don't know who you are when you burn the Resistance to ash, but you're Claire when you just wish that the Peter you loved would come back.)_

You won't.

*

Your body burns with white-hot light until the very atmosphere catches fire.

(_You're Sylar when you hear them scream._)

The pain is purging. It will all be better. No more sickness and no more dying. No more hatred. No more families torn apart. No more governments stomping on people's necks. No more war. No more old people dying slowly, crippled by time. No more babies in shallow graves.

(_You're Mom, nodding grimly to Linderman with a champagne glass in your hand._)

It will be better. It _will._

It has to.

It's the only way.

(_You're Adam when you smile._)

*

You're ten years old and you're in Central Park on a bicycle. Dad brought it home a week ago but you've waited for Nathan to come home for the weekend before trying it out.

Nathan stands by a line of trees, watching as you go super-fast down a hill. Your eyes closed and your arms spread out to your sides. The sunlight is warm on your face and the world is far away. You feel as if you could take your feet off the pedals and fly.

You spill onto the ground with your brother watching, laughing and laughing.

*

Everything is quiet now. The voices don't cry out to you. No one is in any more pain.

Everything is just...still.

The hollowness is more than you can bear.

Continents glide under your feet as you run. Your mind tries to find those snippets of other beings--other lives--other _thoughts_\--you can slide into and not be the one who did all this.

There aren't any.

You collapse when you find the edge of the ocean. You reach for the part of you that controls time

(_that **is** time_)

and put the world on fast forward, watching sunrise after sunset, high tide, low tide, season after season.

It stops when you're done shedding tears. When you can't cry anymore, because it's just so unclear. You tell yourself you did the best you could. Then you tell yourself you did nothing at all. This stillness is in your imagination. You're not a one-man Apocalypse. You couldn't have been. You're just a man.

You look at your hands against damp earth, the grains on the shoreline, until they're all you see.

You're on a beach and you're drawing pictures in the sand. You don't remember how you got here.


End file.
